Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Sunday November 04, 2007 @01:20PM
from the can't-imagine-it-would dept.

AlexGr writes "Jeff Gould raises an interesting question in Interop News:
Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS? The Community ENTerprise Operating System is an identical binary clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (minus the trademarks), compiled from the source code RPMs that Red Hat conveniently provides on its FTP site. It is also completely free, as in beer. CentOS provides no paid support, but it does track Red Hat updates and patches closely, and usually makes them available within a few hours or at most a few days of the upstream provider, which it refers to for legal reasons as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Free support for CentOS can be found in numerous places around the web, and a few third parties offer modestly priced paid support for those who want it."

In my previous gig, we ran ~10,000 RH7.3 servers. Like the author's colleagues, we got to the point where we needed to upgrade. We were amazed that RedHat refused to give us a break on cost; they wouldn't shave off a single dollar. On 10k licenses, mind you!
So, we waved goodbye to RH & migrated the whole thing to Debian. Much less headaches & drama.
I'm not at the point where I want to tell RedHat to go screw, but you gotta question what they're thinking.